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Paul Raffield, "The Separate Art Worlds of Dreamland and Drunkenness: Elizabethan Revels at the Inns Of Court", Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 163-188: This paper examines the conflicting interests of Apollo and Dionysis, as represented by the extraordinary Inns' of Court Christmas Revels, held at the Inner Temple in 1561 and at Gray's Inn in 1594. During these prolonged periods of fasting, the Revellers create a microcosmic Utopian State, in which the primitive life-force of Dionysus is tempered by the ordered dreamland of Apollo. Destructive natural forces are contained and repressed by the imposition of laws. Gerard Legh's The Accedens of Armory and William Dugdale's Origines Juridiciales provide the source material for the Inner Temple Revels, and Gesta Grayorum is an anonymous account of the Gray's Inn Revels. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy provides the theoretical background to the comparison made in this paper between the Apollonian world of pictures and the mystical cheer of Dionysus. The arcane rules governing feasting and the Revels attempt to resolve the conflict between order and freedom: the compelling rights and duties of the individual citizen on the one hand, and the interests of the State on the other. The Revels provide striking visual images of virtue and honour. These images are symbols not only of the law's power and fairness, but also of the patriarchy which the law seeks to uphold, and of the unchanging certainties which that patriarchy represents.

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